Adventures with iMovie

Last week was an audio/video adventure. Editing numerous interviews for a client, I became reacquainted with iMovie. In my pre-Mac days (translation: before I ate the metaphorical Apple), I would use whatever software I could find to edit videos. When I lived in St. Lucia in 2001, I used Adobe Premiere to edit/render videos. Oftentimes the power would go out, my laptop battery would run out of juice, and I would have to start over from scratch. It wasn't exactly a delightful editing process. However, I did learn quite a bit from those days of transferring clips from a tape-based camera to a computer and slogging my way through…I literally learned while on the go.

In 2007 when I jumped ship from PC to Mac, a fortunate accident occurred. iMovie[2] came installed on my laptop as part of the iLife package. When I needed to edit a video, I experimented with Apple's user-friendly video editing application, and I was impressed. One caveat to this post, I've dabbled with Adobe Premiere and with Apple's professional video editor, Final Cut Pro, but it's been iMovie that has consistently been my video editing tool of choice.

Captivating videos[3] are hard to make. It takes practice to create something that people actually want to watch. In my experience, the best way to learn how to use a video editing application like iMovie is to explore its various nooks and crannies. Get your virtual hands dirty. Play around, make some mistakes, render your video, test it out, and keep going. It was so much easier for me to edit 20 interviews via iMovie last week because of my previous experience. Video editing is a skill that is so useful. For Student Affairs professionals, video creation is often part of the job. iMovie makes quick work of most video projects. To my knowledge, there isn't a similar editor for PCs that is as easy to use.

While these probably weren't edited via iMovie, they are some of my favorite higher education videos. They are each captivating in their own way...

This clip from Boston University is heartfelt and honest.

Using humor to send a message…way to go Vanderbilt University.

This is extremely ridiculous and yet it has more than 1 million views!